The panic is over. Facebook is back up

Facebook suffered a service disruption for about four hours Tuesday night, giving users error messages or long response times.

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The panic is over. After several hours of trouble last night, Facebook is back up.

Facebook suffered a service disruption for about four hours Tuesday night, giving users error messages or long response times. The site came back up but suffered another, though shorter, disruption this morning.

The crowd-sourced online monitoring site Downrightnow.com reported today that Facebook had another "widespread service outage" around 9:30 a.m. ET. It's not clear how long the downtime lasted.

The social networking site acknowledged the problem last night but did not give specifics about what caused it.

"Earlier today, an internal issue in our web infrastructure caused the site to be slow or unavailable for a brief period of time," Facebook said in an email late Tuesday. "We resolved the issue quickly, and should now be back to 100%. We apologize for any inconvenience."

The hubbub about Facebook's outage has died down on Twitter. Last night, however, was a different matter. Frustrated Facebook users were quick to complain on Twitter about the outage or to crack jokes about it.

"Facebook is down. I repeat, Facebook is down. Please do not panic. Please move away from your electronic devices in an orderly fashion," tweeted @iamchrisbrewer.

And @DeniseWinters tweeted, "Perhaps it's time to turn off the computer when I go to Twitter to find out if Facebook is down."

Some users poked fun at the recent furor over government surveillance programs leaked by Edward J. Snowden, who worked as a contracted systems administrator for the NSA.

For instance, @raypalena, tweeted, "Facebook is down? Should I call the NSA and tell them to read and like my friends' statuses for me?"

And @DejaVuBoy tweeted, "#facebook is down. We must be under attack. SNOWDEN'S VENGEANCE."